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NSS JUL2014 Bottom.Pdf 2 Los Alamos National Laboratory An unarmed Minuteman III ICBM is launched out of a silo during a test at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. (Photo: U.S. Air Force) DETONATION FROM THE BOTTOM UP Joseph Martz, a technical staff member at Los Alamos since the 1980s, has held a variety of positions during his 20 years in the Lab’s Weapons Program. His responsibilities have included leadership of the pit technology group, management of enhanced surveillance in the Stockpile Stewardship Program, leadership of the weapon design division, and project head for the Reliable Replacement Warhead. NSS asked Martz for his thoughts on stockpile stewardship and its evolution over the last two decades. Stockpile stewardship is a topic dear to my heart. I’ve been fascinated by it, and I’ve lived it—mostly on the technical side but also on the policy side. From 2009 to 2010 at Stanford University, I was a visiting scholar and the inaugural William J. Perry Fellow, working with Perry, former secretary of defense, and Sig Hecker, former Los Alamos Lab director (1986–1997). Together we looked at nuclear deterrence, nuclear policy, and stockpile stewardship and at where all this was headed. The Nuclear World Changes In my career, the years from 1989 to 1992 were the most consequential period with respect to nuclear weapons. Three very important things happened during those years, and they led to profound changes in U.S. nuclear policy. First, we had the fall of the Soviet Union, presaged by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The USSR dissolved on December 25, 1991, and the collapse of the USSR changed everything. The Cold War and its nuclear arms race were over, making an anachronism of MAD [Mutual Assured Destruction], the policy whereby, to deter nuclear war, the United States and the Soviet Union each deployed enough nuclear weapons to ensure the complete destruction of the other. Second, in 1989 the government halted work at the Rocky Flats Plant, outside of Denver, Colorado, where plutonium pits for primaries [the nuclear triggers for thermonuclear weapons] were produced. That turned out to be a seminal moment in the history of the nuclear weapons complex because, frankly, it ended our ability to produce new weapons and effectively shut down the entire nuclear weapons production complex! Over the next 10 years, more than 50 percent of the historic nuclear weapons complex was shuttered forever. Third, the Soviet Union had proposed a moratorium on nuclear testing and conducted its last test on October 24, 1990. “Divider,” conducted on September 23, 1992, was the United States’ last nuclear test. Shortly thereafter a moratorium on testing was legislatively mandated and has been followed by the United States. National Security Science July 2014 3 designers’ skills is vital because although the Cold War is over, shifts in global politics have engendered new national security needs such as protecting the weapons with enhanced security measures in the post-9/11 world. How were we going to manage an aging stockpile and remain agile in the face of changing national security needs? Inventing “Science-Based” Stewardship After the collapse of the Soviet Union, President Bill Clinton commissioned the first Nuclear Posture Review to examine the role of nuclear weapons in a post-Soviet world. This review (and every review since) reaffirmed the continued need for U.S. nuclear deterrence, while also recognizing the changing conditions and constraints in the global security environment. For itself and its allies, the United States would continue to maintain its nuclear stockpile, and nuclear deterrence would remain a central element of our supreme national security posture. But that presented the nuclear weapons laboratories with a huge technical challenge. How could the nuclear weapons labs ensure that nuclear weapons remained safe, secure, and reliable in the absence of nuclear testing? The question was particularly important because the weapons were going to enter configurations that we had no experience with; that is, because we weren’t continuing production, the weapons we had would, by default, age beyond their design life. Could we and our allies rely on these complicated weap- ons in spite of their aging? We would have to understand how age affected the weapons’ performance, safety, and security and do that without any further nuclear testing. The1989 fall of the Berlin Wall was the beginning of the end of the Cold War. (Photo: Open source) This also meant finding new ways to train next-generation designers without the live tests the first generation had used. Any one of those changes would have radically altered how the Lab carried out its national security mission, but all three events together put the Lab in unprecedented territory: How could we and our allies rely instead of designing and engineering new weapons for the on these aging weapons in the absence nuclear stockpile, it would now maintain the stockpile. But the cessation of nuclear testing meant the loss of the most of further nuclear testing? important tool the weapons designers had used for 50 years to develop nuclear weapons and to ensure that the stockpile Rethinking Mission “How To’s” was safe, secure, and reliable. Clearly, we had to rethink the entire problem of meeting our national security mission. Leading that process was Vic Reis, Between 1989 and 1992, three who at that time was assistant secretary for the Department events put Los Alamos in of Energy (DOE) Defense Programs. He would be assisted by the directors of the three DOE weapons laboratories. unprecedented territory. The lab directors, with Reis’s guidance, convened technical experts from across the DOE weapons complex, and what the In addition to closing the factories and putting a moratorium experts came up with was the realization that maintaining the on testing, we’d also agreed not to develop new weapons. stockpile would require an approach that was the complete That meant we’d lose the means that, along with nuclear inverse of the one used during testing. I’ll explain what testing, had developed and maintained the skills of weapons that means. designers: the continued design and production of new, upgraded nuclear weapons. However, maintaining the Continued on p. 6 4 Los Alamos National Laboratory Nuclear Weapons 101 Nuclear weapons are complex devices operating at the Modern Thermonuclear Weapon extremes of physics, chemistry, and materials science. The temperature, pressure, velocity, density, and energy Radiation Case produced in a nuclear detonation are essentially unprecedented in human experience. Furthermore, the need to ensure the safety and security of nuclear devices leads to a great paradox: the weapon must be designed to ensure that its exceptional destructive Primary Secondary power does not manifest itself when not desired but always does when required. And all the components that produce both results must be designed to fit Reentry vehicle within a volume and mass of material smaller than a kitchen stove. Imploding Primary Chemical A nuclear detonation can be viewed as a series of explosive cascading, compounding events, each of which helps amplify energy production for use in the next main stage. A modern thermonuclear weapon has two main stages: the primary and the secondary. The primary is essentially a fission bomb that releases energy from a Plutonium pit runaway fission chain reaction. That energy reaches the secondary, setting it off. The fuel in the secondary Implosion undergoes both fission and thermonuclear fusion and releases hundreds to thousands of times more energy than a fission bomb does. Detonation of a modern thermonuclear weapon begins with an electrical signal to the primary, a signal that is scrupulously controlled to ensure it is transmitted only when there is certainty that a detonation is desired. This signal fires detonators in the primary that ignite a small charge of explosives, which in turn ignites the primary’s main charge of explosives. The symmetrical detonation of this main charge is essential for compressing a pit of fissile material—material capable of undergoing nuclear fission—into a supercritical mass. Plutonium and uranium are the fissile materials most often used to make pits. When the pit is compressed into a supercritical mass, a runaway fission chain reaction takes off, generating tremendous amounts of energy very rapidly. The energy from the primary is manifested as radiation, such as x-ray and neutron radiation. This radiation heats the weapon to temperatures exceeding the temperature of the sun. In modern, two-stage thermonuclear weapons, the primary’s radiation is reflected from the radiation case onto the secondary, a component containing both fission and fusion fuels. The tremendous amount of radiation energy absorbed by the secondary creates a crushing shock wave that compresses the secondary into a state that produces vast amounts of fission, fusion, and radiation energy. The yield from the secondary greatly exceeds what the primary can create. In an atmospheric detonation, the vast amount of radiation energy is absorbed by the air, creating a fireball that emanates thermal radiation and a tremendous shock wave, the sources of the direct damage from a nuclear explosion. Other effects of the nuclear detonation include direct radiation, both x-rays and neutrons, as well as nuclear fallout in the form of fission products. National Security Science July 2014 5 The Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, Colorado, opened in 1952 to build plutonium pits for primaries, the triggers for thermonuclear weapons. Rocky Flats made thousands of pits per year in a plant with over 300,000 square feet of laboratory space. Pit production was temporarily halted in 1989 and completely discontinued in 1992. (Photo: Open Source) Continued from p. 4 From the Bottom Up We quickly realized the best way to do this was to represent all this basic science as a series of mathematical models and Nuclear testing was a wonderful tool.
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